Hunting Ground (34 page)

Alone, like me, we are the only two who are left, though he obviously has his friends and I obviously know that he has them. The Schmeisser I’ve requested is lying on the bed beneath a folded comforter. There are two box magazines of ammunition, a British Mills Mark I grenade, and something else, a spool of piano wire and pair of cutters.

He’s thought of everything and swears he’ll help me if I need him.

The bed is like most others, not flat and of bone-hard, rough boards and so tightly cramped one can hardly move. It’s soft, a real bed like I had at the clinic. Clean and smelling of newly washed sheets, but I’m still far too used to the other. I doze, drift off fitfully. At twelve, I awaken with a start to hear the lonely whistle of a train. One, two, three short blasts and then it’s gone, straight through Avon without stopping. How is this, please? What has happened? Get up! GET UP! Something’s gone wrong.

A cold sweat has broken out all over me. Instinctively, I’ve slipped a finger through the loop of the grenade.

The door … Those steps out there … Are Schiller and Dupuis waiting for me?

The Schmeisser lies on the carpet. The Luger is hidden under my pillow, and I’m remembering. I can’t help but do so. It was late in the autumn of 1941, and I’d just been to Nemours to meet Paul Tessier. Paul had some questions, has raised an issue I can’t answer.

Word had filtered through to him that it could be a trap, that there would be no railway truck of paintings and other pieces, but one full of German soldiers, that Obersturmführer Johann Schiller had been to the Gare de Lyon to inspect the train and had given that empty railway truck more than a passing scrutiny.

In the morning, I find Matthieu and tell him I must borrow a bicycle with a carrier basket, and will need a lift to the railway junction that is just to the south of Bourron-Marlotte. ‘I must closely examine the line again so as to remember exactly how it was.’

‘You’re ill, madame. Why not leave all this to the work of others?’

‘Because they have their lives to live and mine is nearly over, so what about that bicycle, eh?’

His eyes dodge away and for a moment he tries to find a suitable answer, but finally confesses, ‘Certainly, madame. We have a very good one. A German soldier sold it to my wife at the Sunday flea market, just after they … they took you away.’

It can’t be my bicycle but it is. I’m so struck by this, I burst into tears, and for a few moments can only manage to stand in the yard holding on to it.

‘Madame … madame, you must try to forget, not to remember.’

I shake my head. ‘We must never forget, Matthieu. Never! Not in a thousand, thousand years.’

‘But what about those that are waiting at the house for you? Surely Dupuis and the others will begin to understand that you’re trying to remember things? They’ll start remembering, too, madame. They won’t just sit around and wait for you to settle on something.’

‘But that is what I want, Matthieu. They are
also
to remember how it was.’

Vineyards are on either side of the road, the air cool, the light so incredibly sharp. The last of the harvest is in, and I’m again remembering as I should.

The twin villages of Bourron-Marlotte are six or so kilometres to the south of Fontainebleau. Below the road, the land falls gently into the valley of the Loing, but here it is primarily on the north shoulder, next to the forest, that the climate and soil are suitable for grapes. Everyone who can has some. The enclosures are many, and from where I’m now standing, the rows of vines, unpruned as yet, are wine-red and ancient under the autumnal sun.

It is at once the most beautiful thing I have ever seen and yet the most frightening, for it’s here, a little to the south of Bourron-Marlotte, that the main line from Paris through to Nemours and on connects with a branch line that runs off to the southwest to eventually meet the one from Paris to Pithiviers.

This branch line is a crazy one. After meeting the line to Pithiviers, it swings abruptly to the southeast and then south. Throughout virtually all its length, it passes through fields and farms. It’s what Tommy once called a ‘milk run’ and therefore was ideally suited to our purposes.

I start out. I know that for me this is going to be particularly hard. The trees are bare as they were back then.

The land sloped steeply up into the forest. Icy water covered the ditches on either side of tracks, down which a German patrol had stopped.

I pushed the bicycle towards them. In my coat pocket, I clutched one of the leftover grenades from Dunkerque that Paul Tessier had given me to deliver to the others. Once the pin was out, I would need count to three but me, I wouldn’t throw it. I’d not let them take me.

‘Ihre Papiere. Papiere, bitte, Fräulein.’

They’d come down out of the forest to cross the railway line. There were eight of them: two with Schmeissers, the rest with Mauser rifles, their sergeant in the lead.

I leaned the bike against me and handed my papers over. In broken French with bits of
Deutsch,
I told them I was on my way to the village of Ury.

‘But you live near Fontainebleau?’ he managed. He was really suspicious, this
Feldwebel.

I was still clutching the grenade, but found the will to say, ‘
Ja, Herr Oberst, ja
, but this route it is shorter, and I must visit some old people to see how they’re getting along.’

Curtly, he nodded at the bike. ‘What’s in the carrier basket?’

‘Food for them and for
meine Kinder, ja
?’

Five other grenades, three pistols, and a small quantity of ammunition, again from Dunkerque in 1940 and via the
marché noir
since. Also one stripped-down, stolen Schmeisser and the regulation two magazines that were with it.

‘Und Apfelmost,’
he said.

The cider I’d left out, plain as day, nestled in cloth, a favourite of
les Allemands
. ‘It’s so hard to get these days.’

He held up one of the bottles, put it to the sun. I waited. I heard myself saying, ‘
Bitte, Herr Oberst,
please put that back. It’s my daughter’s birthday, and I want it to be a surprise.’

He did. He betrayed that he knew a little more French than I’d given him credit for and slid that bottle into its nest and wished me a good day. Until I was almost out of sight, I knew they were watching me, but I didn’t turn to look back at them and wave.

Then I reached the clearing and pushed the bike up into the forest to meet the road that came by there. It was the first of many patrols, and I knew they must be on the lookout for someone.

The millpond is dark, the geese timid. One slips and goes down on its bum. The others raise a racket and stretch their necks.

At last, a few succeed in reaching open water and the gander ushers the rest of them in. Henri Poulin is talking to Schiller and Dupuis, only Schiller’s not in uniform—he was that day I came up here from Ury in the late autumn of 1941. A staff car was parked on the road, it’s driver polishing the chrome.

But Schiller acts as though he’s still in uniform and, of course, Dupuis is still subservient, deferring always to the other, some habits being simply too hard to break.

Tommy … I knew they were after Tommy, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it except to go home.

They’ve used André de Verville’s car, have taken it from in front of the house, but as if in the present, though well in the past, I hear, ‘Lily, wait! Don’t turn around. We’re right behind you.’

Nicki said that I must lead a charmed life and that I had the most interesting friends. ‘Those two in particular,’ he said. ‘Schiller and Dupuis.’

I turn. I have to, and, of course, Tommy and Nicki aren’t here. How could they be? It’s not the autumn of 1941; it’s four years later, but I must remember the robbery because for us, everything changed after that.

**
Curfew times were often changed at will, though generally settled down to the above.

Below me, down a tumbled slope through trees whose autumn leaves have fallen, Schiller and Dupuis are picking their way among some boulders. Schiller’s older.
Mon Dieu
, he’s iron grey and looks unhealthy, but is he also afraid because I’m the only thing that stands between him and the hangman? Is he remembering how it was?

Dupuis, though just as shabby as before, has obviously been eating as he did during the Occupation, ration tickets or no tickets, simply shopkeepers and maître d’s who wanted to please, cash, too, of course, and the never spoken, always present threat of Sûreté muscle.

Both have drawn their guns and I could perhaps kill them, but that would be too easy. They chased me on the road in that car of theirs back in the autumn of 1941, and I took a little detour. The Fontainebleau Forest is full of such things—side roads, woodcutter’s trails, hiking paths, those of the kings themselves. Les
Monts des Chèvres, the Mountains of the Goats, that’s what this place is called.

They’ve remembered what I’ve remembered. Schiller found it then, and as I look down on them, it’s the lieutenant who looks questioningly up towards where I’m still hidden. Perhaps two hundred metres separate us, not just the years, the camps, and everything else. He’s thin, stooped and pale, so gaunt lines crease that narrow face, the scar glistening even more, but the right eye is also all but closed. Shrapnel, I wonder? The Russian front, but well after the robbery, after the interrogations, the beatings, and the torture, right at the end in 1945 and in or near a Berlin that was being mercilessly destroyed.

‘She’s not here,’ says Dupuis. How I remember that voice.

‘I’m sure I saw something. What about that woodcutter’s hut? It was up there, back of that ridge.’

That’s also a voice that brings instant apprehension, but it’s Dupuis who says, ‘She’s got a bicycle just like in the late autumn of 1941. Is it that you’re forgetting this?’

‘You sound as if you don’t want us to go up there after her.’

Dupuis shakes his head and stuffs his pistol away. ‘I’m merely stating the obvious. That one knows the woods, and we’re still together. If she can draw us out and separate us, she will because she wants to have a word alone with each of us first.’

‘We’ve nothing to say to her; she nothing to us.’

‘You’re forgetting her French side. De Verville got his little lecture. For myself, I think she might not even have wanted to kill him. Far better a very public humiliation and Résistance
trial.’

He’s only partially right about André, but it’s Schiller who snorts and says, ‘You French were always so weak. Follow if you like. I’m going up to the hut.’

‘Perhaps that’s what she really wants.’

They begin to climb. It’s not difficult, a few boulders and gullies, and certainly I could let them have the grenade, but a stone will do just as well since they must be made to feel it as we did: hunted and in absolute terror for their lives.

That bouncing stone whistles past Dupuis who cries out and buries his head in his arms as Schiller laughs and says, ‘
Dummkopf,
a loose rock! Where would she have got a grenade? Plucked it from the trees?’

‘Sacré nom de nom,
she may still have friends and could have made contact!’

In spite of this, they continue, but take the main gully that leads away from me. Just as they have thought, I do have my bicycle, but it’s hidden in a hollow beneath a covering leaves. It’s beside the trail that leads to the hut and when they reach the top, they walk right past it, just as they did back then.

Dupuis, however, stands back as much as possible and lets Schiller nudge the door open, but both must stoop to enter and it’ll be dark in there, for there are no windows, not even a stovepipe hole, and if I had the Schmeisser assembled, I could give them a couple of bursts and terrify the hell out of them, but the bicycle will be as safe as it was before and I can come back for it later.

Sacrificing one bullet from the Luger, I place it in the middle of the trail where they’re sure to find it notched.

Due north of the Mountains of the Goats, there’s the Rock of the Salamander—quaint, isn’t it, to have such names? Now I’m perhaps a kilometre to the north of the woodcutter’s hut and among tall oaks, and from here, I’ll walk across a tableland to find the copse of cedars with its moss-covered boulders that’s still so clear in memory.

Even the lean-to Tommy and Nicki used is where they left it, the roof now a webbing of dry and seasoned sticks. There’s evidence of a last campfire whose ashes are damp as I bring a pinch to my nose and shut my eyes. Immediately, as in the camps with all those dead and dying people around me, I’m right back here in time with Tommy, who fed his tiny fire with such love and care, and sat to one side of it, Nicki to the other. The map Paul Tessier had given me that day in Nemours had been spread on the ground. ‘The train is to leave Paris at four thirty in the afternoon, 10 November,’ I told them. ‘It’s to be a mixed one of goods and passengers.’

‘How many of each?’ asked Tommy.

‘Eight of passengers, twenty-two of goods. The passenger carriages will come first.’

‘And the shipment?’ asked Nicki.

‘Somewhere among the others. This our railwaymen won’t know until the train is finally made up. Right now the truck is sitting on a siding at the Gare de Lyon.’

So it was anyone’s guess where it would be located in the train. ‘What about machine-guns and extra guards?’ asked Tommy.

‘Probably, but none that we know of as yet, just the usual antiaircraft gun on its flatbed, but this, I think the
Boche
will want to keep as far from the art treasures as possible.’

‘What about the dummy railway truck?’ asked Nicki. ‘Will our railwaymen be able to make the switch?’

It was to wait on a siding near Bourron-Marlotte. ‘That’s out. There are no spares.’

‘And the cutting torch?’ asked Tommy.

‘Clateau has promised one from the garage in Barbizon, but must have it back well before dawn.’

‘And if he doesn’t manage to get it?’ asked Nicki.

‘Cold chisels, hammers, and explosives if necessary. Once the truck is located, the rest of the train ahead can be released and sent on down the line. Only two trains a day regularly use that route, so there should be lots time between them for ours.’